7 - Revolutions and Other Presidential Ousters

Summary

In late 2003, a dashing young Mikheil Saakashvili held high a red rose as he and a mass of followers chanted prodemocracy slogans and stormed the parliament during an address by President Eduard Shevardnadze. He literally drank the tea remaining in the president’s cup, and Shevardnadze resigned the next day, a disgraced “autocrat.” A year later, it was the star turn of Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, his once-handsome face now green and pockmarked from eating a would-be assassin’s dioxin-laced soup during the presidential campaign. Backed by nearly a million orange-festooned supporters camped for weeks in the November and December cold of Kyiv, he railed against the corruption and election fraud of the Leonid Kuchma regime and forced an unprecedented “repeat runoff” presidential election, which ultimately made the victim the victor. Overshadowed by this drama was a contemporaneous event in Abkhazia that was equally stunning to the few who were watching: Opposition leader Sergei Bagapsh rallied supporters to snatch power from an incumbent leadership backed by Vladimir Putin in this de facto Russian protectorate in Georgia, forcing them to recognize him as winner of the 2004–5 presidential election. Perhaps most amazing of all was the downfall of Kyrgyzstan’s Askar Akaev, a president in a region that had up to that time been considered an impenetrable, culturally fortified bastion of authoritarianism. Demonstrators wielding tulips and yellow placards defied stereotypes of Central Asian docility and swelled up against him in March 2005. Bursting into his “White House” in the name of democracy, they forced the hapless “dictator” to flee to Moscow – by one account rolled up in a carpet.